I think it is unusual to not have totalitarian communism (not to be equated with moderate forms of socialism) viewed as an evil.
It's particularly in Europe, where many leading intellectuals harbor sympathy to far-left, even violent and oppressive, political views, or assume that even mass murderous systems, like those of Stalin and Mao, came from "good" intentions.
Communism as tyranny
Communism is not only about redistribution of property, which can also be done by a moderate socialist, or any other, system. Marx expected, with a scientific conviction, that workers, as the ones in charge of technology, would use their knowledge to take over the power. This expectation promises a total grab of power and invites people who are bullies and want to become tyrants. Later Marxism, and, still later, Leninism, sought development of communism through a "dictatorship of the proletariat". Leninism boiled down to a central committee of the communist party defining "absolute truths", which everybody had to believe and follow, very similar to the "infallible" pope in the Catholic Church. Marxism-Leninism became the basis for almost all communist regimes of the 20th century, and various guerillas and terrorist groups.
Communists want absolute power and enforce it with unrestricted violence. They fundamentally reject pluralism, liberalism, elections, parliaments, checks and balances. Although they may use such, when they serve their purpose. This is what almost inevitably leads to tyrannies like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, or North Korea, which is probably a stalinist regime with full, still ongoing brutality. Due to their nature, today's communists rarely worship these historical characters as idols, but instead, want to become the next Stalins and Pol Pots, or at least Brezhnevs.
Today, many people wrongly associate communism with vague leftist or even liberal goals, such as equality, non-discrimination and elimination of racism. Communists often hijack such movements to use them for their purpose, and hide their much less noble intentions behind them. However, communism itself has no such inequalities as mandatory parts of it's ideology.
"Antifascism"/Antifa:
Another "justification" for communism comes from the rivalry between communists and various "fascist" movements, and post-WW2 Germany: In the 1920s and 30s, communists and fascists were basically rival gangs, fighting in the streets of Europe, overthrowing the civil governments in some places. After WW2, Nazism was a persisting folk devil, and especially in Germany, a semi-religious dogmatism was established, that Nazism was uniquely evil and must not be compared to any other tyranny, belligerent or murderous political system. Communist propaganda attacked then West Germany as the continuation of the 3rd Reich, presenting communism as the only remedy against a recurring fascism. Hiding behind Nazism became a long term strategy of western communists.
Especially when the communist bloc crumbled around 1990, communists, mainly in Germany, but also in former allied countries, used "antifascism" as their lifeboat. Small, but noisy neo-Nazi groups, the violent Skinhead subculture and a number of racist and xenophobic incidents and hate crimes led to formation of the black clad underground militias, known under the short term "Antifa", and a wide tolerance and support for their violent and oppressive behavior against the general public. This violence immediately targeted victims who had little in common with skinhead or neo-nazi thugs, and strongly utilized purely criminal motivation.
Historical nazism and present time hate incidents were used to give them a free ticket, and the totalitarian communists, who had become unpopular even among leftist groups, could come up and disguise their goals and methods as "antifascism". Much of the leftist political establishment, and especially media, supported this.
All this made few footprints in the USA, until 2016, when the election of Trump created fear of a fascist regime there, when internet trolls, using Nazi imagery and language, became a nuisance, and when fascist individuals like Richard Spencer were much overrated in media coverage. Now it seems like some of the leftist establishment in the US want to install Antifa as an underground political militia and thought police, as it has been in Europe for decades. With the events at Charlottesville, it seems like a final dam broke, where many agreed that the far-right must be countered with violence, and that traditional US freedom values are up to debate, when it comes to the "fight against the right".
I have no idea how influential fascist or even neo-Nazi ideas really are in the US, but I wonder why something, that was originally mainly using German nationalism, can spread to former enemy countries and become a kind of international blueprint for ideological patterns. However, when Antifa is established in the US, as it is largely in Europe, it will be the massive return of violent, totalitarian communism, roughly 70 years after the last "red scare". While not everybody supporting an Antifa group is a commie thug, this is the core of it, exploiting an alleged, or even real, fascist threat for it's purpose.
